Posts tagged nigeria

I first discovered Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie when she was featured on the cover of my copy of Poets and Writers magazine. She was so striking on the cover, with her bold red head wrap and beautiful gaze, and her interview revealed a very intelligent, inspiring woman—I couldn't wait to read her work. In this video, Ms. Adichie talks about the danger of hearing only a single story about another person or country, risking a critical misunderstanding about their depth, beauty, intelligence, and humanity.

In colonial Nigeria in the last years of the 19th century, a strange quirk of history led the British rulers to draw an arbitrary boundary line along the 7?10? N line of latitude, separating the population into two separate administrative districts.

Below the line, the colonial government raised money by levying taxes on imported alcohol and other goods that came through Southern Protectorate’s sea ports. Above the line, the administrators of the landlocked Northern Protectorate had no sea ports, and instead raised money through direct taxes. In the areas near the border, this took the form of a simple poll tax, where tax officials collected from each citizen the equivalent of between $4 and $20 in today’s dollars.

Could this seemingly minor difference—created over a century ago by a long-defunct colonial administration, and long ago erased by subsequent administrative divisions—possibly still matter today?

A linguist friend of mine doing a bit of work on archaic Saharan languages sent me a link to this site at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, full of lovely scans of annotated Qur'an pages from northeastern Nigeria. The manuscripts, which date from the 16th to 18th centuries, feature Qur'anic texts and commentaries (tafs?r) in Arabic along with extensive glosses—the more odd-angled jottings—in "archaic Kanembu," which bears roughly the same relation, my friend notes, to the currently-spoken Kanuri language as does Middle English to that of today. All of which makes for a beautiful piece of parchment, full of layers and meanings.

The Nigerian-British artist Yinka Shonibare has made a whole fascinating series of race/class remix sculptures featuring mannequins of 18th-century European dandies dressed in period clothing cut from "African" Dutch-wax fabrics (made in Manchester and the Netherlands, purchased by the artist in Brixton Market, London). He's currently got a big exhibition up at the Brooklyn Museum.

Though he's now more known for his earnest interpretations of old-school political posters, designer Shepard Fairey first, of course, gained noteriety with his ironic/absurdist interpretations of authoritarian propaganda, with his Obey Giant viral campaign. Ironic and cool, in a particularly American sense that I both find attractive and uncomfortable, kind of the way I feel about ironic t-shirts after travelling in Africa and seeing them everywhere, courtesy bales of donated and resold used American clothing (shirt on a kid begging from me at the bus depot in Vilankulos, Mozambique: "There's only one thing to make for dinner: Reservations!"). The more I learn, the more I wonder about the effort we put into being connoisseurs of manufactured irony. There's real stuff out there that's so much more amazing.